Health promotion: the emerging frontier in nursing

Health promotion is gaining recognition as a health care strategy. The major premise of this paper is that the nature of health promotion is emerging. Rising into view, health promotion offers many challenges and opportunities to all health care professionals. Many of the influences that health promotion will have on nursing have not yet been fully explored. What is health promotion? What concepts are inherent in health promotion? Are there models of health promotion that are specific to nursing? What will be nursing's role in health promotion? What changes are required by the nursing profession to enable nurses to emerge within this new frontier? These are central questions for nurses as health promotion professionals to ponder, and attempts are made in this paper to answer these questions.